Uploaded August 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Jamie Smith is a Reformed philosopher — one of the first to put a Catholic mystic in the title of a book and then proceed to argue that it was the contemplative tradition that brought him back to a flourishing form of faith on the far side of a series of nerdy dead ends. Make Your Home in the Luminous Dark is his most personal and, I would argue, most beautiful book. It began the day, more than a decade ago, when Jamie was in the depths of a severe depression his analytical philosophical training could not think its way out of, and his wife came home from a garage sale with a battered used copy of The Dark Night of the Soul and told him he should read it. What that began — St. John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, Meister Eckhart, Merton — is what this book bears witness to. It is a book about the mystics saving Jamie's faith. It is also a Reformed philosopher's argument that the cultural liturgies project he is best known for needs a prior undoing before its formative work can do anything at all. As I told Jamie in the hour, this is a book that made me feel uncomfortable about how much I enjoyed it. We covered the apophatic/cataphatic distinction with the twist Jamie puts on it, the way certainty is still Cartesian even when it calls itself pious, the trad-wife/manosphere as snorting modernity while claiming to have escaped it, Charles Taylor's Cosmic Connections as the real sequel to A Secular Age, and what to do when Distraction Inc. has fully occupied the inner room. The platform is the plantation. Come sit with this one and check out the book.
the book: amzn.to/4z7nOab
Jamie Smith is a Reformed philosopher — one of the first to put a Catholic mystic in the title of a book and then proceed to argue that it was the contemplative tradition that brought him back to a flourishing form of faith on the far side of a series of nerdy dead ends. Make Your Home in the Luminous Dark is his most personal and, I would argue, most beautiful book. It began the day, more than a decade ago, when Jamie was in the depths of a severe depression his analytical philosophical training could not think its way out of, and his wife came home from a garage sale with a battered used copy of The Dark Night of the Soul and told him he should read it. What that began — St. John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, Meister Eckhart, Merton — is what this book bears witness to. It is a book about the mystics saving Jamie's faith. It is also a Reformed philosopher's argument that the cultural liturgies project he is best known for needs a prior undoing before its formative work can do anything at all. As I told Jamie in the hour, this is a book that made me feel uncomfortable about how much I enjoyed it. We covered the apophatic/cataphatic distinction with the twist Jamie puts on it, the way certainty is still Cartesian even when it calls itself pious, the trad-wife/manosphere as snorting modernity while claiming to have escaped it, Charles Taylor's Cosmic Connections as the real sequel to A Secular Age, and what to do when Distraction Inc. has fully occupied the inner room. The platform is the plantation. Come sit with this one and check out the book.
the book: amzn.to/4z7nOab
